On waking next morning, I felt extremely uncomfortable, and found that my feet were frozen. Not quite familiar with the niceties of Ostiak bed making, I had been imprudent enough, in covering myself with my pelisse, to keep the furry side next to my body, and the heat thus developed had completely melted the snow, and exposed my feet to the low temperature of the dawn. I resolved to profit by this lesson for the future, and, in the meantime, tried to bring the circulation back by walking and running, in which I was, fortunately, successful. By mid-day, to my sorrow, the wind rose very high--a truly Siberian wind, dry and icy, seeming to blind one as it cuts one’s eyes, and sweeping the heaps of snow before it, so as to obliterate in a few minutes every trace of the best beaten road. The natives are accustomed, as soon as winter sets in, to mark their tracks on each side by pines and pine branches stuck into the snow at short distances from one another; but this season the avalanches had been so numerous that, in most places, they more than hid the signal branches. I presently perceived that I had completely lost my way. Plunging about in the snow up to my waist, sometimes up to my neck, I began to think I must perish there from hunger and from cold; but by evening I came on a road again, and, mercifully for me, it was the very one I ought to take, and for which I was in search. It was quite late, when I saw a small detached cottage, near a village, with a young woman standing on its doorstep. The hope of finding a resting-place got the better of all my hesitation; I went up to the woman, and asked her if she would give me a night’s lodging. She made no difficulty about it, and took me into the _izba_, where her old mother sat. I made her the usual greeting, and, in reply to the usual questions ‘where I came from,’ and ‘whether the Lord God was leading me?’ I replied that I came from the government of Tobolsk, and that I was on my way to Bohotole, to look for work. The establishment at Bohotole is an iron foundry belonging to the Russian government, and situated far north of Verkhouterie, among the Oural Mountains; it attracts great numbers of workpeople from the provinces of Perm and of Tobolsk. While the women prepared some food for me, I spread my clothes and my linen before the fire, and, having dried them, and appeased my hunger, I stretched myself on a bench with an indescribable sense of comfort and happiness. I believed that I had neglected no precautions, for, after repeating to myself my Catholic prayers, I had made the orthodox triple salutation, or _poklony_, to the holy images; and yet some suspicions had been awakened in the minds of these women. I learnt afterwards that the sight of the linen I had tried to dry was the exciting cause; they thought me too well provided to be a Russian artisan, for I had no less than four shirts!